How to Minimize Piercing Pain

Learn how to minimize the pain of piercings from professional piercer Owen Beane in this Howcast video.

Transcript

"Hello, I'm Owen Beane, I work at Chameleon Tattoo in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Chameleonbodyarts.com is the website. Chameleon Tattoo's been here more than 10 years, but ten years as such with tattooing, over the last 14 years I've been doing body piercing here in Cambridge and I'll be talking to you about piercings today.

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The only way to minimize the pain of a piercing is to have it done by a good piercer. Okay, so there's really no way that any sort of topical numbing cream is going to help you that much, it might do a little placebo help for you, like sort of tricking yourself into thinking that it hurts less. But a piercer isn't just dealing with the surface of the skin, we're also going through the skin, so anything that's topical doesn't really actually affect you. To properly numb an area would be like a series of injections that actually hurt worse than a piercing actually could. Something like taking Advil or Motrin or anything like that preemptively doesn't actually change the way a piercings going to feel, that would be more useful for after the piercing is done. A piercing when it's done well, quickly and efficiently just isn't that bad at all, so as long as you have it done by somebody who knows what they're doing that's how you minimize the pain of it, it's not that bad at all."